Sketchup_ Model a House (Pt.1) _ SketchUp Show #28 (Tutorial)

In this episode of the SketchUp show, we'll use images of a floor plan to model a house. So another question coming to us, this time from someone who was curious after watching some of our previous podcasts where we've imported CAD plans to model a house, was wondering, you know, if I don't use CAD plans as part of my process, if I do a lot of stuff by hand, or if I just have images of a floor plan that I've found online, can I still use those images to generate a 3D model in SketchUp? And the answer, of course, is yes. And what's kind of cool is I did this recently. I was just looking for a new place, and we were going online, and a lot of real estate websites and a lot of apartment websites have plans. They have images online, and I'm just going to pull one of these up, which was one of the ones we were looking at. And this is from the Centex Homes website, and they've got images of a floor plan. You see this all the time. I've already gone through and saved these images from the website down onto the desktop. So no need to do that again. But you can see there's page one, which is a garage and the main level. And then on the next page, it shows kind of the upper level. So these are just images. They're just JPEG images, and you can just kind of drag them down over onto your desktop, save those pictures out. And it's great. I mean, open up the picture, look at the picture, kind of get a sense of the plan and how it all works out. But wouldn't it be cooler if you kind of experience that plan or experience that place in 3D on your own computer on your own time? And if you're as big of a SketchUp nerd as I am, of course you're going to take the time to model it. So I just kind of want to go through that same process. It's a process I went through recently, so I can kind of walk you through that. If I go up to the top of the screen under file, import on the desktop, I'm just going to go through and search all supported image types and go to use as image. Now you'll notice the plans that I copied aren't a supported image type. GIF files aren't supported image file formats for SketchUp. So one of the first things I want to do is take those GIF files and save them as either JPEGs or TIFFs or PDFs, anything like that. So I'm just going to open that up on a Mac. So I'm just going to open it up on preview and just go and save this GIF as a JPEG. And same file name, best quality. Great. Hit save. And now I've got a JPEG version of that image that I can use. So up at the top of the screen again in SketchUp, I can go to file, file import, click on the file, file import, and then all supported image types. Now it does show up. And this time I'm going to use the image as an actual image object. I'm going to import it as an object. So all supported image types uses image and then click import. Now, right away, the image of the plan comes into the SketchUp model attached to the cursor. So I'm just going to click on the origin to set the image down at the origin and then start scaling it up. Kind of arbitrary at first. It doesn't really matter how big this is to start out with because we're going to scale it here in a second. Click a second time to set the image down into the model. And you can see now we can orbit around. And that image that I've inserted as a JPEG is just a flat, two-dimensional graphic. It comes into SketchUp as an object. And the first thing I'm going to want to do is just check to see what scale that image was imported at roughly. So I can take the tape measure tool and come over and try to measure a known distance in the model. In this case, there's a doorway. And if I measure across that doorway, it tells me here in SketchUp that the distance is seven and a half inches across that doorway. So not quite. I'm going to want to go back and set that to a scale. So I'm just going to type in three feet and hit enter. Ask me if I want to resize the model. Select the option there for yes. And now when I zoom back out, I can go over to that doorway. And when I measure across that doorway this time, I get a dimension of three feet. Three feet, one half inches. If you want to kind of adjust it a little bit a second time, I could type in three feet again and hit enter. If you want to resize the model, sure. You can see it just barely changes a little tiny bit. So since this is an image, and you can see I'm just kind of snapping to and referencing pixels in the image, especially when you zoom in real close, things kind of get a little blurry. They get a little fuzzy. So this is an approximation. It's not going to be totally perfect to within the nearest, you know, 64th of an inch the way it would be if you were importing a CAD file, but it's going to get you close enough for most things. So at this point, having scaled this part of the plan, the other part of the plan is at a different scale. So I'm actually going to section that off as a separate piece. You'll notice when you import images as objects into a SketchUp model that they come in as a sort of an interesting object. It's kind of like a group, but not really. If you start drawing on top of it, either with the pencil tool or the rectangle tool, the objects that you draw on top of those images are separate objects. They're not all stuck or glued together like they would be if that image was just a surface. So one of the first things that you're going to want to do when you import images into your SketchUp model as image objects is right click on those images and explode them. When you explode the image object, it becomes a surface with that image applied to that surface as a texture. So now this is a surface just like any other surface. If I take the rectangle tool, I can draw a rectangle over that garage part. You can see now I'm actually breaking that image object up or breaking that surface up into two smaller pieces. So I can come back, separate the garage. I've just got Apple G set for group as a keyboard shortcut. I'll right click and go to make group. Now that garage is a separate group or a separate piece. The reason I grouped it is so that I can go in and scale that garage as a separate thing. With the tape measure tool, if you scale the model by just measuring a reference point in the model on top of a group or just within the overall general model like I was earlier with the door. If I go in and I scale that door back down to two feet, type in two feet and hit enter, resize the model. It resizes the entire model. So undo back. You see the whole model changes or redo. You see the whole thing changes scale. If you want to scale individual objects within the file, you can either group them first or turn them into components and then go into edit group mode or edit component mode. When you're inside that group or inside that component, you can take the tape measure tool and scale that individual group or individual component separately. So now I can go to that door and actually scale this door over here. This looks like the actual entry door. So we can scale that entry door and type in a distance of two feet, six and hit enter. Now you see the window says, do you want to resize the active group or component? Say yes. And if we zoom out, I can undo back and redo. And you can see it's just that group that's changing scale, not the entire model. So a couple of ways to do that. But now at least we've got both pieces in there at the right scale, the garage, which is underneath and then the main level over here, which is on top. So back over to this main part of the file, I'm just going to take the move tool and move some of these edges over a little bit just to kind of tighten things up a little and then just start drawing right on top of this image. I can take the rectangle tool and I can start drawing some rectangles, just tracing over the image file. It doesn't really matter how close or how precise I'm being right off the bat because as soon as I take push pull and pull that wall up and type in nine feet, hit enter. And if it's off, I can just push it back or pull it forward. So you can always adjust the model based on what the image is telling you. So I can push it back a little bit with the push pull tool. Maybe push it back a little bit more over here and do the same thing on the front there. So this image now is going to give us as much information as we're going to need about what's going on with the walls between the rectangle tool, which is what I'm using here to draw the rectangle on the side and the push pull tool, which is what I'm using now to pull that wall out. It's just a process of going back and forth. So rectangle tool, draw a rectangle, the push pull tool, pull that rectangle out. And I'm just looking at the image here for a reference.